Financial Markets and Economy
U.S. Investors Late for Iran Deals Worth Billions, Greylock Says (Bloomberg)
U.S. investors are at risk of getting shut out of deals in Iran while their European competitors get a head start on billions of dollars in opportunities unlocked by the lifting of international sanctions, according to Greylock Capital Management.
In the Bizarro World of Negative Interest Rates, Saving Will Cost You (NY Times)
Here’s a proposition for you: Hand over your money. I’ll skim some off the top, hold it for a while and return whatever is left in a year or two.
Until a few years ago, that’s the kind of offer a gangster might have made. In the world as we’ve known it, if you lend someone your cash you expect to receive something — typically, interest — in return.
China's Two-Speed Economy (Wall Street Journal)
Fushun, a city built on coal in China’s industrial northeast, is in full-blown recession. Liu Junfen, a scrap-metal merchant who gathers discarded bicycles, hubcaps and gas cylinders to feed to local steel furnaces, says that prices have plunged by two-thirds since China’s overbuilt real-estate market took a dive in 2014—if she can find buyers for her junk at all.
Activity has all but dried up in the riskiest part of the stock market (Business Insider)
Big initial public offerings are one of the most attention-grabbing moves in the stock market.
And for the most high profile of IPOs — think Alibaba and Square — it is very much the day's big event.
IPOs mark not only a new era for companies that may have been small or nonexistent just a few years ago, but also serve as a barometer for investor sentiment.
In Search of the Perfect Recession Indicator (Philosophical Economics)
Given the downturn in the energy sector and the persistent economic weakness abroad, investors have become increasingly focused on the possibility of a U.S. recession. In this piece, I’m going to examine a historically powerful indicator that would seem to rule out that possibility, at least for now.
Acceptance as a Trading Virtue (Trader Feed)
I recently wrote on the topic of how the ways in which we analyze markets can generate the frustration we experience as traders. When we try to fit markets into the ways we prefer to trade, we not only distort our processing of information; we also create inevitable drawdowns. One trader, needing to trade trends, views a non-trending market as "choppy" and untradable. But the trader who views markets in terms of cycles knows that there are trending periods in markets and there are mean-reverting periods. There are higher frequency cycles and there are lower frequency ones.
The Wall Street Journal: China lowers target for 2016 economic growth (Market Watch)
China gave itself wiggle room in lowering its economic growth target this year, though it still set the pace at a relatively high 6.5% to 7%, suggesting the government prefers buoying the slowing economy to more painful retrenchment.
In opening the National People’s Congress on Saturday, Premier Li Keqiang laid out policies and goals for the year that aim to stimulate growth and encourage restructuring of industries afflicted with overcapacity.
Five Pieces of Conventional Wisdom That Make Smart Investors Look Dumb (CFA Institute)
Are investors neglecting more difficult dimensions and taking unwarranted shortcuts in order to try and make sense of information overload?
Take paper book sales: You might casually assume they are a lost cause in the age of e-books, yet the latest figures show they are surging. Or vinyl record sales: They are dramatically on the upswing amid a wave of retro-philia.
This bull market gets no respect (Market Watch)
The current bull market — barring some sudden market catastrophe — is looking to celebrate its seventh birthday on Wednesday. But what it has in longevity, it lacks in love.
So far, the current bull market has lasted 1,762 trading days. Should it last another 29 trading days, or until April 15, it will surpass the bull market that lasted from June 1949 to August 1956 in length. The longest post-war bull market was the monster that lasted for nearly 10 years until March 2000, or for 2,389 trading days.
Politics
What’s At Stake For Republicans In This Weekend’s Elections (Five Thirty Eight)
Have you had your fill of the Republican presidential primary? If so, then go outside and enjoy the fresh air. But if you’re a glutton for punishment, then you’ll be happy to know Republicans will vote in Louisiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Maine on Saturday (and in Puerto Rico on Sunday). Together, 168 delegates are up for grabs this weekend, or 14 percent of the 1,237 delegates necessary to win the GOP nomination on the first convention ballot.
Technology
This is how Bugatti built the Veyron — the insanely fast hypercar that's now been succeeded by the new Chiron (Business Insider)
It had 16 cylinders, 1,001 horsepower, went from 0-60 in 2.5 seconds, had a top speed of 253 miles per hour — and a starting price of well over $1 million.
The Bugatti Veyron was made of incredible numbers. What began as a mere idea deep within the Volkswagen Group grew to become the equivalent of the Concorde for the road.
Your Smartphone Knows Who You Are and What You're Doing (Bloomberg)
Your phone knows more about you than you think.
It knows where you’ve been and who you were with, the birthday gift you bought your mother and who you plan to vote for. Sex last night? It knows that too if you’re using one of the applications for couples trying to conceive.
Health and Life Sciences
Neuroscience says these five rituals will help your brain stay in peak condition (Quartz)
Thanks to improvements in medicine, more of us are living longer. That makes we have a heightened investment in making sure our brains stay in shape as we age, too. While an increased life expectancy will not necessarily lead to a higher incidence of cognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s alone is expected to affect over seven million American seniors by 2025.
Life on the Home Planet
These Chewable Coffee Cubes Help Nerds Feel Like Pro Athletes (Buzzfeed)
The lobby of the WeWork on San Francisco’s Market Street looks like The Truman Show, but for startups: It’s the middle of the afternoon, and people are actually playing ping pong. The jug of complimentary “fresh fruit water” is icy and glistening. Stay in the same place long enough and the same Macbook-toting twentysomething is bound to loop by again.
New study: fully automating self-driving cars could actually be worse for carbon emissions (Vox)
Self-driving cars are at a fascinating juncture right now. We know they're coming soon. We know they're going to change things. But we don't know how they're going to change things — in what directions, to what effect, how quickly — so there's no end of breathless speculation.
